“You kill your elephants?”

“Not any more. But there was a time when men killed elephants for pleasure, or for food, or to use their tusks for ornaments. And there was a time when men used elephants for beasts of burden. If the elephants had g’rakh, they—”

He realized that he had fallen into Srin’gahar’s trap.

The nildor said, “On this planet, too, the ‘elephants’ let themselves be exploited by mankind. You did not eat us and you rarely killed us, but often you made us work for you. And yet you admit we are beings of g’rakh.”

“What we did here,” said Gundersen, “was a gigantic mistake, and when we came to realize it, we relinquished your world and got off it. But that still doesn’t mean that elephants are rational and sentient beings. They’re animals, Srin’gahar, big simple animals, and nothing more.”

“Cities and machines are not the only achievements of g’rakh.”

“Where are their spiritual achievements, then? What does an elephant believe about the nature of the universe? What does he think about the Shaping Force? How does he regard his own place in his society?”

“I do not know,” said Srin’gahar. “And neither do you, friend of my journey, because the language of the elephants is closed to you. But it is an error to assume the absence of g’rakh where you are incapable of seeing it.”

“In that case, maybe the malidaror have g’rakh too. And the venom-serpents. And the trees, and the vines, and—”

“No,” said Srin’gahar. “On this planet, only nildoror and sulidoror possess g’rakh. This we know beyond doubt. On your world it is not necessarily the case that humans alone have the quality of reason.”

Gundersen saw the futility of pursuing the point. Was Srin’gahar a chauvinist defending the spiritual supremacy of elephants throughout the universe, or was he deliberately adopting an extreme position to expose the arrogances and moral vulnerabilities of Earth’s imperialism? Gundersen did not know, but it hardly mattered. He thought of Gulliver discussing the intelligence of horses with the Houyhnhnms.

“I yield the point,” he said curtly. “Perhaps someday I’ll bring an elephant to Belzagor, and let you tell me whether or not it has g’rakh.”

“I would greet it as a brother.”

“You might be unhappy over the emptiness of your brother’s mind,” Gundersen said. “You would see a being fashioned in your shape, but you wouldn’t succeed in reaching its soul.”

“Bring me an elephant, friend of my journey, and I will be the judge of its emptiness,” said Srin’gahar. “But tell me one last thing, and then I will not trouble you: when your people call us elephants, it is because they think of us as mere beasts, yes? Elephants are ‘big simple animals’, those are your words. Is this how the visitors from Earth see us?”

“They’re referring only to the resemblance in form between nildoror and elephants. It’s a superficial thing. They say you are like elephants.”

“I wish I could believe that,” the nildor said, and fell silent, leaving Gundersen alone with his shame and guilt. In the old days it had never been his habit to argue the nature of intelligence with his mounts. It had not even occurred to him then that such a debate might be possible. Now he sensed the extent of Srin’gahar’s suppressed resentment. Elephants — yes, that was how he too had seen the nildoror. Intelligent elephants, perhaps. But still elephants.

In silence they followed the boiling stream northward. Shortly before noon they came to its source, a broad bow-shaped lake pinched between a double chain of steeply rising hills. Clouds of oily steam rose from the lake’s surface. Thermophilic algae streaked its waters, the pink ones forming a thick scum on top and nearly screening the meshed tangles of the larger, thicker blue-gray plants a short distance underneath.

Gundersen felt some interest in stopping to examine the lake and its unusual life-forms. But he was strangely reluctant to ask Srin’gahar to halt. Srin’gahar was not only his carrier, he was his companion on a journey; and to say, tourist-fashion, “Let’s stop here a while,” might reinforce the nildor’s belief that Earthmen still thought of his people merely as beasts of burden. So he resigned himself to passing up this bit of sightseeing. It was not right, he told himself, that he should delay Srin’gahar’s journey toward rebirth merely to gratify a whim of idle curiosity.

But as they were nearing the lake’s farther curve, there came such a crashing and smashing in the underbrush to the east that the entire procession of nildoror paused to see what was going on. To Gundersen it sounded as if some prowling dinosaur were about to come lurching out of the jungle, some huge clumsy tyrannosaur inexplicably displaced in time and space. Then, emerging from a break in the row of hills, there came slowly across the bare soil flanking the lake a little snub-snouted vehicle, which Gundersen recognized as the hotel’s beetle, towing a crazy primitive-looking appendage of a trailer, fashioned from raw planks and large wheels. Atop this jouncing, clattering trailer four small tents had been pitched, covering most of its area; alongside the tents, over the wheels, luggage was mounted in several racks; and at the rear, clinging to a railing and peering nervously about, were the eight tourists whom Gundersen had last seen some days earlier in the hotel by the coast.

Srin’gahar said, “Here are some of your people. You will want to talk with them.”

The tourists were, in fact, the last species whatever that Gundersen wanted to see at this point. He would have preferred locusts, scorpions, fanged serpents, tyrannosaurs, toads, anything at all. Here he was coming from some sort of mystical experience among the nildoror, the nature of which he barely understood; here, insulated from his own kind, he rode toward the land of rebirth struggling with basic questions of right and wrong, of the nature of intelligence, of the relationship of human to nonhuman and of himself to his own past; only a few moments before he had been forced into an uncomfortable, even painful confrontation with that past by Srin’gahar’s casual, artful questions about the souls of elephants; and abruptly Gundersen found himself once more among these empty, trivial human beings, these archetypes of the ignorant and blind tourist, and whatever individuality he had earned in the eyes of his nildor companion vanished instantly as he dropped back into the undifferentiated class of Earthmen. These tourists, some part of his mind knew, were not nearly as vulgar and hollow as he saw them; they were merely ordinary people, friendly, a bit foolish, over-privileged, probably quite satisfactory human beings within the context of their lives on Earth, and only seeming to be cardboard figurines here because they were essentially irrelevant to the planet they had chosen to visit. But he was not yet ready to have Srin’gahar lose sight of him as a person separate from all the other Earthmen who came to Belzagor, and he feared that the tide of bland chatter welling out of these people would engulf him and make him one of them.

The beetle, obviously straining to haul the trailer, came to rest a dozen meters from the edge of the lake. Out of it came Van Beneker, looking sweatier and seedier than usual. “All right,” he called to the tourists. “Everyone down! We’re going to have a look at one of the famous hot lakes!” Gundersen, high atop Srin’gahar’s broad back, considered telling the nildor to move along. The other four nildoror, having satisfied themselves about the cause of the commotion, had already done that and were nearly out of view at the far end of the lake. But he decided to stay a while; he knew that a display of snobbery toward his own species would win him no credit with Srin’gahar.

Van Beneker turned to Gundersen and called out, “Morning, sir! Glad to see you! Having a good trip?”